Dancing Around the Fires of Hell

A Nation's Spiritual Blindness

We are weeks away from another national election and still staring at ugly political realities—an election in which the propaganda machine and its celebrity buffoons prop up an unpopular Marxist; and a nonstop campaign of ballot hijinks and judicial malfeasance. One man is the singular enemy of the Left, the bullseye for several assassination crews. The foundations of our storied American experiment are covered in graffiti, riddled with tunnels, and stinking of weed. As dismal as our political prospects appear now, our post-2020 apocalypse has served at least one useful function; it has pulled off the masks to reveal two very real spiritual forces at work in our world.

Those of us who grew up in the 1970’s and 1980’s remember a time when such spiritual realities weren’t yet forced to the surface. The average American wasn’t drawn to visceral ideologies. Being a Democrat simply meant cheering for the working man, with the requisite affinities for taxes, labor unions, and women’s rights. Being a Republican likely meant you championed wealth creation and embraced free markets and lower taxes, with little patience for social agitators. Neither party seemed eager to welcome illegals or publicly snuggle with communists—although the Left has always made room for them.

For a few post-war decades, and even in the Cold War’s nuclear fears, our political parties carried on with their usual theater. Average people had no real audience for strident opinions—we had no Facebook rants—and nobody except Hitler himself was called a “literal Hitler”. The Constitution wasn’t decried as a racist blueprint for inequity and oppression. The state didn’t shamelessly prosecute the incumbent’s political rivals. For many, beliefs filed neatly into the “religious” and “political”—the former regarded as a benign but private affair, and the latter aired only at election time. Simply put, most were aware of neither the deep magic nor the deep state, content and safe enough with a two-dimensional understanding of life.

Yet during those decades of sleepy prosperity, the Left slowly gathered its own faithful through their unified appetite for all sorts of darkness. They knew the American electorate couldn’t stomach the hard stuff yet—and Rome wasn’t built in a day—so transformation would require patience and shrewd calculations. It helped that Americans were prosperous, entertained, and unsuspicious; America was strong, free speech was good, Marxism was bad, and there were two genders. Common ground like this gave cover for dirty work behind the scenes in Capitols, schools, and churches. The Left’s quiet capture moved along with the help of complacent and distracted citizens, hastening their transformation into willing dupes.

Moms and dads would always need to send kids to schools, and that is where the long-game has seen its great successes. Textbooks and teachers undermined the fussy old experiment; they praised the Great Society, riots, and the United Nations but cast shade on “greedy” capitalists and religious conservatives. Outside the classroom, decades of well-trained sheep would welcome government programs and echo talking points of the fifth estate—Oprah, Dan, and Katie seemed so smart! Nobody needed to know about dusty stuff like the Constitution, regulatory agencies, or federal judges; journalists were keeping an eye on those things. Fortunately for the Left, political news was often dismissed as mere partisanship, anyways; and without spiritual eyesight, Americans continued to ignore the threats.

Patience has paid off handsomely. Medicine, education, and government are now fully enveloped in the Left’s death culture—as witnessed in the drugged masses, dismembered unborn, and “nonbinary” children that epitomize its celebrated programs. The American idea isn’t enough to stave them off anymore; the safety net is gone, citizenship is meaningless, and the Constitution is trampled. The fumes of hell will continue to ignite the Left’s multiplying evils; and dependably, they will also inspire the cowardice and compromise of blind enablers on Right.

For a surface understanding of our perils, we can trace our own steps down to the pit by reading history and economics. We can read of wicked tyrants, communism’s lies, death camps, and failed utopian schemes. We can even connect our cultural decay—broken homes, riots, perversions, addictions— with data that proves the collective failure of all sorts of compassionate federal remedies and social movements. Such facts do tell part of the story.

For a deeper understanding, though, we must look beyond timelines and statistics to see what bubbled beneath the surface. For this, we can’t rely on historians or political theorists—not even the good ones. Proverbs teaches, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” and only with such wisdom can we see through headlines to the old enemy, lurking and lusting for unwary souls as he did in the ancient garden.

For many decades, we have stepped away from biblical wisdom and its inconvenient, convicting truths. It felt happier to pretend that God could be kept in a little “personal” box, as though the King of the universe could be contained. We imagined that God slept or floated haplessly above his rebellions creation, on-call for the yearly “blessing of the pets” or Christmas Eve service. We reasoned that society was “progressing” towards something more exciting than “religion”—towards what, we knew not, but wasn’t progress always good?

It seemed that keeping God at a distance or ignoring his word would shield us from his crushing demands; meanwhile, it blinded us to his amazing grace. God is not blind, though; and he does not bow to progress or forget his word. He demanded blood, but he crushed his own Son instead; and thereby he lovingly restores rebels and gathers his faithful into a very different kind of kingdom. Other kingdoms topple, but God’s will not.

Our fractured world and its political realities are reflections of the unseen, and to deny such is to live in a world of dangerous fantasy. Battles rage on both sides of the aisle; the spiritually blind of all political stripes have their own false wisdom, along with their false love, freedom and joy; our nation stumbles under the burden of such ignorance. The Left proposes its “unity” now; but it’s a unity that revels in darkness, a political fellowship of those who grope in the dark. May God have mercy, invade our hearts and give sight to our wandering blind—lest we unify in cackling joy to dance around the fires of hell.

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And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed.—Daniel 7:14